Meeting Design. Kevin M. Hoffman

FIGURE 1.1 Meetings can be pretty costly when we are unprepared, because it’s everyone’s paycheck.

      If you still need a meeting, the problem needs to be defined. When the problem feels under (or even un-) defined, identify and agree on the problem the meeting is intended to solve. Then diagnose the problem. Can anyone in your group be specific about what a check-in meeting is intended to accomplish? If they can, that’s a good start.

      Job performance indicators for Team Rocket’s standing meeting could include an increase in efficiency by reducing the number of steps in a process, a list of ways in which the designs can be “ahead of the curve,” or the amount of new ideas produced around current problems reported by people receiving food delivery. Each of these goals is measurable, establishing a baseline against which the meeting can be examined.

      Working from a primary problem, you can identify secondary problems, such as identifying and routinizing successful processes, or confronting individual fears about what could go wrong if Team Rocket weren’t doing its job well. Focusing on what could go wrong also has the potential to repair a negative project culture by providing a transparent forum for building camaraderie and trust.

      A meeting is a synchronous approach to communication. It takes full advantage of the ways in which human beings communicate via speech, intentional and unintentional body language, and manipulation of physical space, such as creating a diagram together. A meeting affords tremendous capabilities for communication, but not all problems require this much communication to address. Once you have an agreement about the intended outcome, you’ve take the first step toward designing better meetings. The next step is running some experiments.

      Consider Multiple Formats

      Team Rocket is trying to position their design work and their client as groundbreaking in the competitive market of online meal delivery. A positive outcome of the ongoing meeting could be measured by the amount of agency (or client) blog posts around unique functionality, as it’s being developed. They are currently producing up to two blog posts per week, but that output isn’t fast enough to keep up with the conversation. Each time they meet, they talk at length about this problem, and then they talk some more.

      A conversation is only one of several ways to structure this team’s time. Sadly, most meetings lean heavily on talking and only talking. Instead of talking, they could try collaboratively visualizing the process of getting a blog post published in a flow chart on the wall. A wall diagram, as seen in Figure 1.2, shows how visualizing a process in sequence can reveal efficiency gains by examining and questioning individual steps to publication. Physical objects that can be manipulated, such as sticky notes, can catalog options—pros and cons. What about even spending some time without speaking, where ideas are written and shared before being discussed?

FIGURE 1.2 Sticky notes create models to visualize discussion.

      Productive meetings increase clarity about a problem, identify tactics to solve a problem, and evaluate the relative merit of those tactics. Sometimes conversation can get the job done, but constraints presented by the human brain are often inaccurate and too subjective. See Chapter 2, “The Design Constraint of All Meetings,” for an overview of these problems.

      Exclusively relying on conversation and human memory is a single pattern for executing a meeting, and often a faulty pattern that creates disagreement where none may exist. There are other patterns for facilitation and capture. You’ll find them throughout the book, with most residing in Chapters 3, 4, and 5: “Build Agendas Out of Ideas, People, and Time,” “Manage Conflict with Facilitation,” and “Facilitation Strategy and Style.”

      If you’ve started exploring other options, the next step is to pick the options that sound promising and start making some changes.

      Make Small Changes and Assess Improvements

      What if Team Rocket never changed their meeting format? Sticking to a meeting format without further experimentation is like flying on autopilot: it only works for a limited amount of time. Symptoms of autopilot meetings include the same, strong personalities repeatedly driving the agenda and people tuning out, agreeing to whatever runs out the clock. Worst of all, the autopilot meeting loses sight of its original intention. With iterative changes over time, a regularly scheduled standing meeting can be tweaked to balance contributions and use structured collaboration to reclaim precious work time.

      Team Rocket might experiment by introducing time limits for individual speakers. In certain corners of Google, time limits have proven to be one of the single most effective methods of keeping meetings aligned to decision-making.⁴ The ruthlessness of a simple countdown clock keeps comments on task (see Figure 1.3), warning the group when someone is running out of time to speak. Meetings with this tool start closer to the scheduled time and finish ahead of time. As suggested previously, writing before speaking within a target length, such as a single sentence, also encourages people to consider what they say before they say it.

FIGURE 1.3 Some departments at Google use a simple timer, called the time timer, to keep meetings on track.

      Without questioning (and measuring) performance, standing meetings fall into autopilot, or worse, disrepair. Staying open to refinements of what is already taking place within an ongoing status meeting avoids these problems. But eventually, all recurring meetings must end, which is the last step in the process of designing a meeting.

      Know When the Job Is Done

      After adding a countdown clock and using sticky notes to visualize their process, Team Rocket has been able to increase the number of cutting-edge feature announcements they make about their work. They decide to discontinue the meeting, and feel damn good about that decision.

      Walking away from something that has done its job feels great. Agreement about how long a standing meeting is going to be in place can be reached by following that design thinking process through to its natural conclusion: research and understand the problem, try multiple agenda protocols, and iterate or tweak the format until the job is done.

      A Better Definition of “Meeting”

      Habits are the result of behaviors becoming separated from an awareness of the intentions behind those behaviors. When habits form as parts of the process of working together, such as standing meetings, those meetings start to be labeled with descriptions, rather than ascribed with purpose. They are “where the team gathers,” or “when we talk about the project,” or simply “that thing we do on Tuesday.” When you apply a design process to meetings, you reconnect getting together with having a reason to do it.

      Consider the very next meeting that you’re about to have. Do you have doubts about its value? Ask yourself, or your team, two simple questions about that meeting. These questions will help you define its job in a way that reconnects it to a larger purpose.

      • What is the outcome this meeting will enable?

      • How can you measure that outcome?

      That’s a simpler, better definition for a meeting. A meeting is something that